JSDoc VS ESLint

Thanks to JSDoc it's easy to write documentation that is coupled with your code and can be consumed by users in a variety of formats. When combined with a modern publishing flow like JSR, you can easily create comprehensive documentation for your package that not only fits within your workflow, but also integrates directly in the tools your users consume your package with. This blog post aims to cover best practices when writing JSDoc-style comments to get your users up and running as quickly as possible:

Note: For simplicity, I will omit the JavaScript documentation, but for a production grade code you may want to add the documentation (see jsdoc.app website for more).

You may like JSDoc[1] if you just want some type-safety from the IDE without the compilation overhead.

It’s done wonders when I’ve had to wrangle poorly commented legacy JavaScript codebases where most of the overhead is tracing what type the input parameters are.

Personally, I’m impartial to TypeScript or JSDoc at this point. But I’d rather have either over plain JavaScript.

[1] https://jsdoc.app/

I wholeheartedly agree. At most, I introduce JSDoc[1] to newer developers as standardising how parameters and whatnot are commented at least gets you better documentation and _some_ safety without adding any TS knowledge overhead.

[1] https://jsdoc.app/

This is where JSDoc comes to save the day.

The best way to do this, of course, is with JSDoc. But something I always found awkward about jsdoc is defining the object types in the same file. So, after a lot of reading, I found a way to combine JSDoc with declaration type files from Typescript. Let me give you an example:

There is a lot of specific symbols presented on the JSDOC specification that can be found here: https://jsdoc.app

JSDoc is a specification for the comment format in JavaScript. This specification allows developers to describe the structure of their code, data types, function parameters, and much more using special comments. These comments can then be transformed into documentation using appropriate tools.

Working with new features, frameworks, and tools, the experience of reading documentation is a critical part of it. I have been lucky to work with projects that feature really easy to read documentation such as USWDS and Bun, but I've also had the misfortune to work with pretty terrible documentation like JSDoc. The JSDoc documentation lacks a search field which makes searching for specific items an ordeal and also does not cover many hidden use cases. It provides less than the bare minimum for what it needs to do - a lot of the time I am forced to rely on external user documentation elsewhere to use JSDoc effectively. That was why I was drawn to the search field in particular in Docusaurus.

The Svelte team followed suit but motivated by the maintainer's developer experience as they migrated the project away from TypeScript in favor of plain JSDoc comments for type annotations instead.

ESLint: JavaScript linting.

But what is a symbolic link exactly? It comes from programming and I often liken symbolic links to basic redirects but with greater stability. However, not every package needs a place in .bin. Packages like nodemon, webpack, gulp, eslint and create-vue are found in .bin because they need to be executed. On the other hand, packages like animate.css, swiper and express operate at the application layer, so you won't find them in .bin after installation. How does npm determine whether a package is executable or not? It's simple: by using the bin property in your package.json to specify the executable path. If your package is executable, you can set it accordingly. Let's take a look at prettier's package.json file

Eslint: It analyzes our code to quickly find problems. We will use the default setup provided by Vite.

A big part of my work revolves around JavaScript tooling, and as such it's important to keep an eye on the ecosystem and see where things are going. It's no secret that recently lots of projects are native-ying (??) parts of their codebase, or even rewriting them to native languages altogether. Esbuild is one of the first popular and successful examples of this, which was written in Go. Other examples are Rspack and Turbopack, which are both Rust-based alternatives to Webpack, powered by SWC ("Speedy Web Compiler"). There's also Rolldown, a Rust-based alternative to Rollup powered by OXC ("The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler"), but Rollup itself is also native-ying (??) parts of their codebase and recently started using SWC for parts of their codebase. And finally, there are Oxlint (powered by OXC) and Biome as Rust-based alternatives for Eslint and Prettier respectively.

Let's be honest - setting up tools for a new project can be a frustrating process. Especially when you want to jump straight to coding part. This is often the case with ESLint and Prettier, two popular tools in the JavaScript ecosystem that can sometimes interfere with each other when it comes to code formatting. Fortunately, there's a simple solution to this process, and it's called eslint-plugin-prettier.

Do you have the need to find and fix problems in your JavaScript? Then ESLint is for you. With over 120 million downloads each month, it's definitely one of the most popular projects out there. The latest version introduces a new configuration system, designed to simplify available configuration options. Old and deprecated rules have been removed, and a new configuration inspector has been added. Check out the blog for all the highlights, and a migration guide.

ESLint: A pluggable and configurable linter tool for identifying and reporting on patterns in JavaScript.

Automating code checks with static code analysis allows us to enforce code styling effectively. By integrating tools into our workflow, we can identify errors at an early stage, while coding instead of blocking us at the end. For instance, flake8 checks Python code for style and errors, eslint performs similar checks for JavaScript, and prettier automatically formats code to maintain consistency.

If you're a developer, you're surely familiar with Prettier and ESLint. With over 8 years of existence, they have established themselves as references in the JavaScript ecosystem.

eslint is used to avoid code errors